Waking the Warriors
£18.99A modern fable from Booker prize-winner Ben Okri, inspired by the ancient legend of the sleeping warriors who wake when the kingdom is in mortal danger…
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A modern fable from Booker prize-winner Ben Okri, inspired by the ancient legend of the sleeping warriors who wake when the kingdom is in mortal danger…

Mairéad, a child-free talent agency head, has her orderly life upended when her estranged sister's daughter comes to stay after a mysterious accident. What begins as a temporary arrangement soon throws everything into question.

When Irène joins the International Tracing Service, she becomes consumed by a singular obsession: returning the belongings confiscated from concentration camp prisoners to their families. A faded cloth doll. A medallion. An embroidered handkerchief. Each object holds a story – and behind each one, a life waiting to be pieced back together. As Irène traces the owners through fragments of evidence, she reconstructs their final days and discovers that even in the darkest chapter of history, humanity endured.

The new novel from the number one New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places, Jennifer Niven. The Newmans are America's favourite TV family. But, when a car crash throws their series finale out the window, the cracks in their lives threaten to pull them apart . . .

Sophie, a painter, is holidaying with friends in a stunning villa in Greece – her best friend Helena is shortly to be married, and this is the last time she and her friends will be together as single women. But life has treated them so differently since their university days, that Sophie is questioning everything about their friendship. Meanwhile her partner, Greg, is desperate for them to try for a baby, but she wants to devote herself to her art – and there are other, deeper forces, pulling the two of them in opposite directions. In the course of the holiday, Sophie paints a nude portrait of her friend Alessia, and becomes involved in an intense affair with Ky, who lives and works on the island. Both the painting, and the affair, will challenge everything Sophie thinks she knows, about art, about motherhood, about sex – and about how and with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life.

Jay has been hunted since he was twenty years old. A contract on his life has been traded like a commodity, rising and falling with Bitcoin. On the run once again, with no passport, and airmiles as his only currency, Jay will have to choose between love and survival, and run for his life!

Alternating between past and present, and between Safa and Dinah, this is a gripping and powerful story that sheds light on the ongoing occupation of Palestine. It is a tale of belonging and identity, of devastation and displacement and – ultimately – of the enduring universality of humanity and love.

Munich, 1938. As dark shadows gather at the fringe of the traditional Oktoberfest revelry, Julia Ormesby finds herself falling in love with Conrad von Echlau. Later, on the eve of war, they are forced to recognise that the weight of history leaves them little chance of a life together. Julia moves from rescuing refugees to a pivotal role at Bletchley Park, while Conrad is awarded the Knight’s Cross for the capture of a crucial Allied stronghold on the Belgian border. When he is selected for a top secret mission on the Suffolk coast, their destinies collide once more. Immediately after Dunkirk, the nation is gripped by the fear of enemy invasion – so Churchill’s intelligence chiefs have decreed that every member of von Echlau’s incoming unit must die.

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life. But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate’s words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.’ And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colourful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, the world’s delusions in a ‘Inventory of Wrong Ideas’.

Banyuls-sur-Mer, French Catalonia: one hot summer in the 1970s, the lives of three generations of women converge in the long tropical garden hidden behind the Villa Wintrebert, named after the biologist who lived there with his wife. As in her debut After Nora (2024), Penelope Curtis deftly weaves fact and fiction in this moving story of childhood and of adult complicity. Harmony beween la belle Eugenie and the young Monique is disrupted when a well-intentioned commission to the renowned local sculptor, Aristide Maillol, shines a light on the fundamental fragility of the women’s relationship, on which the villa and its garden had depended. Decades later, Monique invites Eva and her two little girls into the villa, where traces of the past imprint themselves on the present.

Close to the shore is the island: uninhabited, wild, with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip on reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel, opening a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become. Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth’s mother, Edith, locks her daughter away – first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free.

‘Our job is to travel. A different job from arrival.’ As the ship Discovery makes its slow way through space towards New Earth, two children, Hsing and Luis, born into the ship’s society, come of age together. But just as their destinies seem to be unfolding as decreed, a revelation about Discovery’s true course throws new light on to their shared future.
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